The last ten years has seen mobile devices revolutionize how people communicate, coordinate, and socialize. For example, mobile phones have become an integral part of the feeling of connectedness that friends and family share with one another, allowing them to keep in touch regardless of location. While voice communication is highly natural and expressive, it also requires immediate attention, occasional privacy, quiet surroundings, and does not scale well for coordinating within medium or large groups of people.
Text messaging, also know as SMS (Short Message Service), is a lightweight text communication tool for mobile phones. As the name implies, messages are very short and typically limited to 160 characters for most encoding schemes. SMS allows one person with an SMS-enabled phone to send a text message to another person with an SMS-enabled phone. SMS-enabled phones are in widespread use in Europe and Japan and the use of SMS appears to be gaining acceptance in the United States.
Despite the many advancements of mobile device technology, communicating with more than one person at a time can be cumbersome, time consuming, and/or inconvenient particularly when dealing with time-sensitive information. Furthermore, with all the social uses of mobile phones, communication beyond the person-to-person scenario such as in a group setting can be rather challenging. Virtually all existing mobile communication and photo-sharing solutions are person to person. Phone calls are made one to one though a user may have the option of adding other individuals one-by-one. Text and photo messages can be sent to an individual or a list of individuals, but there is not a way for a group to communicate and share media as a group. Groups must be built up from a list of individuals one-by-one, and replies to messages go only to the sender. There is no persistence in groups over time. Thus, if one member of a family wishes to send a picture from their camera-phone to everyone else in their family, they must individually select each member and send it. Furthermore, comments about the photo would go only to the sender and when someone else wished to share another photo, they would have to build up the list of recipients again from scratch. Moreover, with all the social uses of mobile phones, effective group communication remains a challenge.